Each month, we spotlight an assortment of special features, reviews,and artist interviews from the pages of Electronic Musician.

It's in your control room's nature to lie. Even the best controlrooms, in top-dollar studios, do not provide a completely flatfrequency response throughout the room. You want totally flat? Mixoutdoors, with your monitors off the ground and pointing at the sky -and good luck staying in the sweet spot above them!

As rough as vocal sessions can be for the engineer, they can be manytimes worse for lead singers with limited vocal training. If you'realready reminiscing about torturous vocal-tracking marathons you'veendured, it's time to turn the tables and take control of vocalvexations.

Having experienced many years of unflagging popularity, Finaleremains an industry standard in the realm of notation software. Notcontent simply to rest on its laurels, MakeMusic, Inc. (formerly CodaMusic Technology) has continued to update Finale with new tools andrefinements on an almost yearly basis.

Røde recently introduced two affordable new microphonesdesigned specifically for stereo-miking applications: the NT4, anunusual-looking stereo mic, and the NT5, a small-diaphragm condenserpackaged in matched pairs. I have a fondness for strange-looking mics,so I jumped at the chance to test these new transducers from DownUnder.